As a young girl, I took little joy from the study of history. Memorizing dates, coloring in maps, reciting the names of one dead white male after another — none of this mattered to me. I disengaged, and instead was drawn to the poetry shelves at my school and local libraries. While some of my classmates amused themselves by naming countries and capitals, I eagerly devoured poems by Walt Whitman and Nikki Giovanni, smitten by their cadence and images, and fueling what would become a lifelong passion for me.

A few years later, in high school, my compañeras in our feminist group demanded that the administration offer a “Women in History” class. We had both enough students to justify this, as well as a young, engaged teacher, Ms. Bushke, willing to take it on. Together, with no textbook (this was 1972), but overflowing with enthusiasm and righteousness, we joined with our teacher to write the curriculum as we launched what became New York City’s (and possibly the country’s) first such course in a public high school.

We took a critical look at the role of gender in popular television shows (I wrote about “The Brady Bunch”), and then delved into essays by and about Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grimké sisters. I remember the excitement of discovering these chapters of America’s past. My hunger for learning my country’s (and eventually, the world’s) untold history grew, and so did my learning, as my book bag grew heavier with even more frequent trips to the library.

And yet, in my mind, history (quickly, for me, becoming herstory) was still very much about one heroic person after another. I was still not seeing the core role of social movements and the changes being birthed by everyday people. I definitely did not see myself as one of millions of agents of change in the world. From today’s vantage point, I can see the irony in my compañeras and I not seeing ourselves as making history by struggling with a conservative school administration over the women’s history course.

Thanks to the struggles of those who came before me, I have had more opportunities than my grandmother and mother, and my daughter has more than I have. It could be easy for me, as a white, middle-aged woman living in Silicon Valley, to be complacent. Instead, I think of the following written by Audre Lorde (may her memory always be for a blessing), and ponder what my next solidarity project will be.

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”